


A Weapon's Weapon

by knucklewhite



Category: Dominion (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 05:37:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3839086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knucklewhite/pseuds/knucklewhite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every time she puts her hand on the hilt of her Corps-issued sword, she feels a sense of rightness: the weight of it in her palm, the way it warms under her grip. It's what she was made for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Weapon's Weapon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyrilu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/gifts).



> Thanks so much to plingo_kat and kyrilu for organizing this. I hope you enjoy this, kyrilu! <3

In the beginning, there was war. The collision of atoms, the bristling of pride, the stealing of apples — everything starts with conflict. And every good conflict needs a good soldier.

—

It’s night by the time the camp convoy gets settled near Lake Mead. ‘Lake’ is an optimistic term for the huge bowl of dirt. The bone-dry lake bed extends into the distance until it vanishes in a haze of red dust that blurs the mountains beyond into indistinct humps. The expanse is lined with a network of deep cracks. It looks as if some giant’s fist — _Father’s fist_ , Noma thinks — thumped down and smashed the ground to pieces.

But Michael is right. There’s always water if you dig deep enough.

Noma has always loved the desert. It looks bleak at first glance, but life teems here. Mounds of bursage seem sun-bleached and dead until they sprout flowers come springtime. Tiny lizards the color of sand flit from rock to rock in the space of a blink. It’s fitting that one of the last enclaves of humankind is thriving in this landscape.

She plucks a sprig of desert sage, rubs the buds between her fingers to smell the life of it. The dusty wind whips her hair across her face as she looks at the lights of the city in the distance. Vega glitters on the horizon like the promise of sunrise.

It’s nearly time.

Behind her, the vehicles, wagons, and tents of the camp huddle together against the chill of the desert night. She’s been with this moving city for five years now, sharing a space in the back of a minivan that might have been white in some distant past, but is now skewbald with rust. Four of them bed down in the rust bucket. There are two sisters in their late twenties, old enough to remember snatches of the California they grew up in, and a camp-born boy just turned twelve. Noma’s learned to mimic their speech patterns. She's saturated herself in their presence enough to feel almost human herself. It’s a good feeling. The interior of the van is wallpapered with pictures from old magazines gathered from dilapidated truck stops and barren grocery stores: serious women with red lips, the shell of a building set against cloudy skies, a red-cheeked child blowing on a dandelion. There’s a twist in her gut whenever she lies on her bedroll and looks at the images floating above her in the darkness. Human lives. Human history. So fleeting, so bright.

It’s the longest she’s lived among humans, and every day increases her faith in Michael’s mission. In Michael. He’s always had her sword, but now he has something more. Is that sacrilege? Maybe. But Father isn’t around anymore to cast her down.

The wind kicks up a sheet of dust. She blinks the grit out of her eyes, and when she opens them again, Michael is there, cold and serious, his wings folding back like a fan sliding shut at the flick of a wrist. Noma rolls her shoulders at the answering itch between them. She hasn’t flown in months.

“Noma.”

It’s good to hear his voice. It’s like seeing the ocean after being too long inland. She no longer feels the urge to lower her head to him — that passed an eon ago — but being in his presence is like coming home. It’s almost like hearing Father’s voice.

She licks her lips. “Is it time?”

“It’s time.”

“What’s he like?”

Michael smiles. The sight is rare enough to raise Noma’s eyebrows. “Good,” Michael says. He looks down at her, unblinking. “He’s good. But he needs you.”

She huffs. “Of course he does. Who else is going to teach the kid that brooding isn’t the default response to everything?”

This time Michael’s eyebrows are the ones doing the rising. She shrugs; it’s not entirely apologetic.

His gaze shifts over her shoulder to the dark mass of the camp laid out on the plain. “How soon can you leave?”

She follows his stare. The sound of music — a guitar, a mournful woman’s voice — drifts up to them on the breeze. They’re both quiet for a long moment, listening.

“Let me get my things,” she says, but they both know she means ‘let me say my goodbyes’. In the distance, she can see the dirty white-and-brown smudge that has been her home for the past half-decade. An orange campfire burns beside it. Simon will be reading one of his books in the glow of the fire. Keisha will be heating mystery, unlabeled cans for their dinner. Kira will be placing bets on the outcome: ravioli or beans? Or, even worse, canned fruit.

Michael nods, reaches out to brush the back of her hand with his fingers, and then launches himself into the night. The backdraft from his wings creates a mini sandstorm at Noma’s feet.

—

He’s not hard to find in the tunnels. Sure, his bright hair and bright smile stand out in the gloom, but even more apparent is the way the other kids cluster around him — and not just for handouts of the food he steals from storehouses and trucks marked with the Frost sigil. He’s like the sun, and they’re all flowers turning towards him.

He still doesn’t see it, of course.

But he will.

—

“You’re good,” she says. “Keep going. The Corps is going to be way harder than this.”

“Nomes.” Alex’s voice holds a note halfway between a warning and a whine.

They’ve been training for over two hours now, and they’re both slick with sweat and aching in those annoying places where previously undiscovered muscles decide to make themselves known. Underfoot, the dirt of the training field has been baked oven hot by the afternoon sun, warmth plain even through the soles of their boots. Over the constant hum of the city announcements (“Citizen of Vega, are you ready to do your duty?”), there’s the muffled crack-crack of a target practice session echoing from the shooting range next door.

“Oh, you really think you can hurt me? Please.” Noma curls her upper lip and sneers. “Come on, soldier, show me what you’ve got.” It’s Captain Finch’s voice, a perfect imitation of their resident ball-cracker. To soften it, she pokes out her tongue.

“That’s it,” Alex says, grinning. “You’re going down, Banks.”

“All talk, Lannon. All talk.”

He laughs and launches himself at her, hooks a foot behind her calf and pulls her down with a thud. They grapple on the warm ground, kicking up a cloud of red dust around them that gets in their eyes, down their throats. Noma’s stronger than him, of course — but not by much. His strength never fails to surprise her. It takes most of her power to flip him, straddle his waist, and pin his hands at either side of his head. He bucks up against her, his wrists slippery with sweat under her grip. She grins, showing her teeth in a way she knows riles him, and presses down harder, grinding her fingers into the dirt. Twisting his head, he snaps at her wrist. She watches, amused, as he closes his teeth around the meat of her palm, under her thumb, not hard enough to hurt.

“Really?” she says, laughing, “ _Really?_ You’re going for the biting thing?”

He gives her flesh another gentle bite, a swift lick — gross, she must be covered in dirt — and thumps his head back onto the ground, raising a puff of dust. “Shit, Noma, how the hell are you so good at this?”

She smiles down at him and winks. “All part of my charm.”

The sun is a hot weight pressing on the back of her neck. Sweat trickles into the hollow at the base of her spine. Alex is a furnace beneath her, even through the heavy material of his uniform pants. The shadow she casts over him bisects his face — half shadowed, half bright. Two paths. Two possibilities.

She realizes she’s stopped smiling when his face reflects her seriousness back up at her. Time slows to a syrupy drip, a glistening pause on a threshold that stretches out and out and out into the horizon.

He licks his lips, and she can’t help her eye tracking the movement of his mouth. It’s a glaring mistake, and she knows he’s seen it, because he stills, his eyes darkening. He shifts under her, cranes his neck up to meet her mouth.

They’re kissing.

It’s like a head-on collision. It’s like a fall. It’s like biting into a forbidden apple.

It’s endless.

She’s the first one to pull away. She rolls off the heat of him, thumps to her back by his side, and lets out a heavy sigh.

“Dammit, Alex.” She clasps her dirty, sweaty hands over her eyes, but she can still see the light of the sun through her eyelids, through the flesh of her palms, the warm pink glow of this body's blood. There’s no switching the sun off.

“Noma?”

“That’s not what I meant when I said ‘show me what you’ve got’.”

His fingers creep across the dirt to intertwine with hers.

—

Alex rolls over in his bunk to meet Noma’s eyes. She’d close them, but he’s too quick, damn him. He seems to have an unerring sense of when he’s being studied.

They stare at each other across the foot of space between their bunks, listening to the quiet, sleeping breaths of their Corps barracks-mates. Ethan, as usual, is snoring fit to wake the dead. Noma’s mouth twitches at an especially aggressive snort-splutter; he sounds like a dying rhinoceros.

This space, the quiet — or not so quiet, in Ethan’s case — noises of her comrades, her Corps brothers and sisters around her: it’s the closest to happiness Noma’s ever felt since the second fall. She might not be one of them, but she’s _one of them_. Every time she puts her hand on the hilt of her Corps-issued sword — the sword Michael, with a small smile, placed in her hand at her graduation ceremony — she feels a sense of rightness. The weight of it in her palm, the way it warms under her grip. It’s what she was made for.

Alex reaches out a hand, and, after a moment of consideration, Noma stretches across the space to hook her index finger with his.

“Don’t you want something more than this?” he whispers.

Noma wrinkles her nose. “More than what?”

“Rules, regulations, the V-system.” 

“Still all about the V-system, huh? Look, we’ve got food, we’ve got a place, we’ve got a _function_. We’re protecting our people. We’re made for this, Alex.”

His finger twitches against hers. “Are we though? What about freedom?”

“Tell that to the people outside the walls.”

He sighs. “Yeah, I plan to.”

“Shut the fuck up, Lannon!” Johnson yells from three bunks over. “Some people are trying to sleep here.”

Their fingers slip apart, and Noma turns onto her back to stare at the blank darkness of the bunk overhead.

—

The breeze on the balcony of Michael’s eyrie is free of dust, cold and clean. Noma looks down at the city where it spreads around the Stratosphere tower like a glittering blanket. There’s a method in its ordered design: the warp and weft of strands interlocking to make something more than the sum of their parts. It’s so different to the haphazard sprawl of the camp, a city that reforms into a different arrangement every time it halts, like a roosting flock of birds. In Vega, everything has a place and everything has a purpose.

It is, Noma thinks, very like heaven.

Michael was made to be a weapon. It’s his purpose. He’s the sword of God, the general of God’s armies. He can never be anything but, it seems. But what does that make Noma? His sheath? His shield? His weapon?

What is it to be a weapon’s weapon?


End file.
